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bishop's perspective:
How can it be?
I ask that question often. I asked it again last week, "How can it be?" The wonderful 34-year-old wife of Cokesbury Church's youth pastor died after a valiant fight against the odds. Ed Mitchell, one of our fine retired pastors, recently survived critical surgery but died from unexpected complications.
Now Rick Howard, one of our finest and most conscientious young pastors, is fighting for his life. Bill Akers, another one of our marvelous young pastors, faced a bleak future a couple of years ago when a tumor was discovered on his brain. He is now a vibrant survivor. I am reminded of the tragic events during my days as a district superintendent when one of our highly regarded preachers murdered his wife and then took his own life. How can these things be?
Mary wanted to know, too. She desperately needed to understand. Poor virgins don't have special babies. She was scared. But the angel's message was clear: "You shall conceive and bear a son and his name shall be called Jesus the son of the most high."
But Mary asked the angel what we would ask, "How can this be?"
The obvious answer is that it can't be. It doesn't square. The equation is out of whack. It's impossible. The answer is plain and simple: It can't be. No way. The angel has it wrong. Or, I'm not hearing it right. I imagine that for nine months this question troubled Mary. Even on that incredible birth night in the stable, she must have asked again, "How can this be?" It's incomprehensible! It's unbelievable! Amazing! Shocking!
We ask that same question again and again. The mystery and miracle of birthing a baby is stunning. It's too big to understand. You see, ecstasy is unfathomable and tragedy is unfathomable. So time and again we cried this question, "How can this be?" from the abyss of our pathos. There is no easy answer.
Nothing is tidy and neat about this. Yet, we must respond to these paradoxes of life. Ultimately, we must come down on the side of trusting God's grace and providence or allowing cynicism to consume us.
"How can this be?" Like Mary, the incomprehensible gives us urgent reason to do deep, deep pondering. You see, it is when we are up against it, at a deadend street, backed into a corner, that we tend to hear God most clearly.
All Mary had to hang onto was a fragile memory that an angel had spoken an incredible promise to her. All the prophet had to cling to was an insignificant bud on the trunk of an old tree stump. In the black dark of our own nights struggling with the questions of why the young die and the depressed commit suicide and the innocents are victimized, we can only hang on to a promise that Jesus gives us, "Lo, I am with you always!"
Only a faith so strong in God to relinquish our control or the necessity to understand can lead us to trust God enough to declare, as Mary finally did, "Let it be."
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Bishop Ray W. Chamberlain
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